SAHA Expo 2024 – Otokar looks at the future; considerations by the new General Manager
For its first appearance at SAHA Expo Otokar, a Koç Group company, exhibited five of its wheeled best sellers, three 4×4, the Cobra II 4×4, the Akrep II and the URAL SOV special operations vehicle, and two bigger vehicles the Arma 6×6 and Arma 8×8. With over 33,000 vehicles in service in more than 40 countries across five continents Otokar is definitely one of the big players in the armoured vehicles field.
At the Istanbul exhibition EDR On-Line spoke with the recently appointed Otokar’s General Manager, Aykut Özüner
“Looking at the Otokar current product portfolio I must say that the strategy developed by my predecessor years ago we have no major gaps, from light 4×4 wheeled armoured vehicles up to heavy wheeled or tracked vehicles,” Mr. Özüner says, adding that “we are getting the fruit of this strong portfolio; as we recently announced we were invited for tender negotiations by the Romanian government. We are also looking for some further business in the Gulf area. We have some business in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, we delivered some vehicles, and we are looking for new projects. In Europe we acquired an order from Estonia for our Arma 6×6 and we are currently producing those vehicles, first deliveries being planned before year end.”
That said, Mr. Özüner considers that his current task is to accelerate the success of the company with the existing product portfolio also to focus on the delivery processes, something key in this historical moment especially in some regions of the world where tension is increasing, and nations are strengthening their defensive assets. “A key issue is that Otokar is a very agile company, and we can quickly adapt our projects to customers needs and deliver accordingly in a short time. In my first months in the company, I noticed how products are not standard, and how we are able to quickly adapt them to the various needs.”
This is also due to the strong Research and Development department, 50 to 60% of all office employees being related to engineering. “And our capacity to quickly adapt our product comes from close coordination between engineering and production. They work side to side in order to design and develop a system which is then easy to be produced as transition from the prototype to the real product must be as smooth as possible in order to shorten delivery time.”
First testing is done on prototypes, however further tests are done on pre-production vehicles as in the industrialisation process many changes might have been introduced. “Here you may need to take very quick decisions to fix some problems, and this might also impact your subcontractors,” Mr. Özüner underlines, implying the capacity of his company to quickly react to those issues.
Having mentioned subcontractors, Otokar’s General Manager underlines the growth of those companies in Turkey, which allowed the whole automotive business, commercial as well as defence, to grow and become less dependent on foreign providers. He also adds that events like SAHA Expo are key to improve contacts between OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) and SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises), underlining how the latter are more and more interested in working in the defence business.
While Otokar’s portfolio is quite complete, nonetheless new trends in the military world are leading to the development of innovative products, exploiting new technologies. One of them is definitely that of unmanned ground vehicles. “Among the investments Otokar is doing the one on unmanned vehicles is certainly among the most important ones, as here we are on the learning curve. Our Alpar allows us to increase our knowledge in this field, it allows us to explore the reality of new technologies, and in 5-10 years it might become a real product and enter our portfolio,” the company General Manager says. However indirect technology development is also a path towards the future, “as we can direct our subcontractors towards some technologies, we can become a sort of role model for them, both taking benefit from such approach, we can even partially finance the development or provide engineering support,” Mr. Özüner explains.
One of the key issues remains that of producing vehicles with higher and higher protection while limiting their GVW, “and this is very much an engineering work,” the General Manager says, adding that examples of that strong R&D work are the latest versions of the company Arma 6×6 and 8×8 vehicles, which couple amphibious capability to a very high (and undisclosed) level of protection.
Beside autonomy and the always present fight between weight and protection, another evolving issue is propulsion. “Of course, considering military world we talk about hybrid, and in my view this is not yet a mature solution. We all know which might be the advantages of hybrid propulsion, and I feel that its use in the military domain, as well as that for autonomy, will become clearer in the coming 4-5 years.”
Photos courtesy Otokar and P. Valpolini
